Treating a wound will impact how long an injury lingers, your ability to move, and how you feel. Fast wound healing is necessary for athletes and people who rely on their bodies for work. The longer you’re injured, the more time you spend waiting to come back.
Bad wound care prolongs the injury, and good wound care leads to a faster recovery. Unfortunately, few people know how to reduce inflammation and promote new skin, muscle, or blood vessel growth. In addition, the more time it takes to heal increases your chances of re-injury. People return sooner than they should and often hurt themselves again as a result.
Effective wound care lowers the chances of infection and gets you on your feet faster. Here are some basic things you can do to speed your recovery and feel better after an injury.
Proper Wound Care Prevents Inflammation
Inflammation is part of your body’s natural response to a cut, sprain, or other injury types. When you’re hurt, your body marshalls resources, mainly white blood cells, to the area. As a result, your injury becomes inflamed and red. It’s one of the reasons you see swelling around joints or puffiness on any hurt body part.
However, too much inflammation or prolonged inflammation slows the healing process. Anything you can do to control inflammation will speed up your recovery. If you’re injured, the RICE method keeps inflammation in check. RICE stands for:
Rest
Ice
Compression
Elevation
Each component contributes to lower overall inflammation levels, which increases your body’s ability to heal faster.
How to Avoid Infection
In addition to controlling inflammation, stopping infection is vital to effective wound care. If you want to recover faster, you must avoid an infection that can prolong healing or worsen things. Plenty of people who start with a minor cut or injury end up in much worse condition due to infections.
The best way to avoid infection is to keep the wound properly covered. Injuries that involve open wounds should remain covered with a clean bandage until full scab forms. Also, keeping your wound clean stops germs or bacteria from getting inside and causes a full-blown infection.
Doctors can also provide medications that treat infections and clean the wound in more severe injuries. This will promote faster healing and shorten the time out due to injury.
Wound Care Lowers the Chance of Re-Injury
Many significant injuries are often re-injuries. When someone doesn’t take the time to rest after they’re hurt, they increase the risk of re-injury, which will likely be worse than the original wound.
For example, many tendon or ligament injury victims fail to rest for the time required to heal. Because many ligament injuries aren’t accompanied by intense pain like a cut, bone break, or sprain, people mistakenly feel they’re ready to get back in the gym or on the bike before they are ready.
Rushing back from an injury can be a fast track to more swelling and pain. Patients should work with a doctor on a reasonable timeline for any significant wound that guarantees they heal fully and don’t delay recovery.
Physical Therapy Boosts Recovery
Working with a physical therapist can shorten recovery time and boost healing. A severe injury like a broken bone or torn ligament often impacts the muscles around it. As a result, people are weaker and have less stability after an injury. The lack of muscle support is one of the main reasons why so many people injure themselves when they return to normal activity levels. Their bodies aren’t ready yet.
As a result, people rely on weak muscles or muscles they don’t typically use for running or walking, and they injure themselves further.
A physical therapist works with patients to recreate muscle support around joints and bones. They can also tell patients what to do at work or home to speed their recovery and reduce pain.
Making Sleep a Priority
After an injury, your body needs time to heal. Most healing occurs while asleep. Unfortunately, many people sacrifice sleep in the name of work or fun. When you starve yourself of sleep, you’re more likely to ignore signs you need rest or that your injury isn’t ready for increased activity levels. People who lack sleep are usually more stressed, eat poorly, and struggle to recover after injuries.
Proper wound care involves plenty of sleep to give your body time to regenerate. Make sleep a priority, and realize how vital it is to a faster recovery.
Peptides & Wound Recovery
BPC-157 is a peptide composed of 15 amino acids according to peptidesciences.com. It’s a partial sequence of body protection compounds (BPC) isolated from gastric juice. In research experiments in animal models, BPC-157 demonstrated wound healing benefits, including accelerated healing for tendons, ligaments and bone.
BPC-157 increases type 1 collagen in tissue and maintains the GI tract’s mucosal lining. It’s an effective anti-inflammatory and, in animal models, increases tissue damage repair by promoting blood flow to injured areas. In addition, BPC 157 has neuroprotective properties by moderating serotonin and dopamine production in the brain.
